On 'Superhumans', and Humanity

Posting a comment that I put up on a friends' blog post sometime back. He has started his own venture post his MBA from MDI. It's called 'Discover Life', and is engaged in motivational workshops for young adults (to put it rather crudely).

The original post can be found here:-
http://getdiscoverlife.blogspot.com/2010/05/race-for-superhumans.html#comments

And now, for the post:-

Budhia Singh, Tathagat Awatar Tulsi, and now Sahal Kaushik. I hope and fervently pray that he is not forced to meet a similar fate.

At the risk of sounding a little cynical, I am just not happy to learn about this 'achievement'. Yes, it is good to note of the boy's prodigious intellect, but I am alarmed and apprehensive of what might be made of it by minds who may be inferior and definitely not discerning enough to nurture and groom it the way it should be.

Reading the news of Sahal Kasuhik, a 14 year old boy topping the Delhi zone of the Joint entrance Examination (JEE) conducted by the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), I was instantly reminded of Lewis Terman's study that was cited in Malcolm Gladwell' 'Outliers: The Story of Success'. He gives cogent and profound arguments that substantiate how out intellect (and academic credentials) is a necessary but now sufficient condition to make us successful in our lives.

An analogy from the book that comes to mind is that of Basketball players and the correlation of their heights with their achievement at the sport. One needs to be reasonably tall, say at least 6 feet. And then, for every extra inch thereafter, you have a little edge over others a little less endowed. But after a threshold height of say 6' 7", it just stops mattering! Now, what is more important is the player's dribbling, passing, mental fortitude and application.

Similar is the case with our IQs, and our social skills. We should avoid reading too much into test scores, other than a threshold measure. Exceptional performance in tests seldom translates to exceptional performance in life.

To cut a long story short, let us all, as parents to be, try and inculcate a balanced perspective in our children to be, and encourage them to be the best they can: complete with respect for their and their peers' individuality. Let us try and give them a childhood that they can look back at with a smile...!